The End User Strikes Back
by DWH
Summary: A disgruntled programmer enters a LSF KOTOR game, general hilarity ensues. The term plot gizka takes on a whole new meaning, the Ebon Hawk turns purple, and who knows what may happen yet? I forsee a NURBS chicken in someone's future...
1. Frankly, Carth, You're Unromantic

For the first time in a very long time, Carth could look upon a person without any suspicion or distrust. He looked at his partner in travel and in combat, Karalina Jade, and said, "I… I think I could love you, if you'll give me a chance."

Karalina smiled, slowly and tentatively, and replied, "I think I could love you, too, Carth."

Carth's face burst into a huge grin. He could scarcely believe that something good was finally happening to him. He noticed, though, that Karalina's face had an odd look on it. He could not quite place it, but it was not characteristically, well… _her._

"Ah… are you all right?"

"Nope, I'm fine," she replied. But something was definitely odd. Her accent and inflection had changed, as had the timbre of her voice. It was slight, but noticeable.

"Are you sure?"

Karalina rolled her eyes and sighed. "The programmers really _did_ make you the distrustful sort, didn't they?"

Click, snap. "You're not Karalina."

"Oh, yes I am. More than you know. Your problem is that you didn't really know her. Nor are you really supposed to… I, eh… messed with the source code." She looked slightly abashed, and grinned sheepishly. "You're a computer program and, well… I'm the end user."

"Wait a minute, _end user?_ What kind of a title is that?"

She shrugged. "It's simple enough, though I guess it might be a little shattering to your reality to know that you're a computer game, albeit a very well-written and high quality one. All it means is that everything around us, including me at the moment, is a whole bunch of code. And I'm the one manipulating it."

"So what you're saying is you can change anything in here."

"Well, to a certain extent, yes. I'm a little shaky on some things though, so I try not to make drastic changes." She looked around the cockpit of the Hawk for a second. "For instance, I could make the cockpit purple."

Carth looked at her incredulously. This was a side to Karalina he'd not seen, though he was beginning to think it was a side he'd rather have stayed secret. Even as he thought this, the interior of the cockpit turned a brilliant violet.

She looked around, seemingly quite pleased with her handiwork. "There, that's much better."

"It's purple."

"You have a problem with purple things?"

"Only when they're taking over the cockpit!"

She looked mildly annoyed, sighed, and then the cockpit turned back to normal. "You're really no fun, you know that?"

"Yeah, I'm a real big killjoy. I go around shooting gizka, too."

Karalina grinned, and got that mischievous twinkle in her eye he'd grown to rather like. Pah, who was he kidding? He loved it, and just about everyone knew it.

"You know, I didn't come here just to trade insults with you. The program will let me do that without my intervention."

"So, Ms. Karalina 'End User' Jade, why do you grace me with your presence?"

"It's quite simple, really." She gave a half-smirk. "You're entirely unromantic, and I've decided that needs to change."

"I'm- what? What do you mean by that?"

"Flowers, Carth. Did it ever occur to you that I might like flowers?"

"Where am I going to find flowers on a spaceship?"

She paused to consider this. "Point taken. However, you're not off the hook. Did you know, that if I were a guy, I'd get Bastila to fall for me, and she'd actually kiss me. I don't even get so much as a hug."

"But you're not a guy."

"You're missing the point, Mr. Onasi. And it's not even _really_ your fault, I suppose. But I thought I'd give you fair warning before I fix what the writers so incompetently left out."

He raised an eyebrow. Karalina did have some technical proficiency, both with slicing and repair, but somehow he was feeling a little uneasy about her newfound resolution. But she was nothing if not stubborn, and he knew that look. As much as he was aware that she was behaving slightly differently from the norm, she was much as she ever was.

"Would you care to run by me again who exactly you are, and what you're doing here?"

She smiled. "Absolutely. Let me give you the setup- this, all around us, is a computer game. An RPG, or role-playing game, to be specific. This means that the end user, that's me," she took a slight bow, "is in control of the events of the game. I built this character, and I chose all her responses from a bank of prewritten answers."

"So all this time, when I was talking to you, it wasn't really Karalina, it was you."

"Well, yes, I suppose. But I'll admit there were few times when there weren't responses that I wouldn't actually say, at least to you. So, in a way, you've known me as the end user this entire time. It's a sort of meta-existence." She shrugged. "But it's true that the real me, sitting behind the terminal, is not really a soldier, or a Jedi. Just a computer science major with a big imagination and a love for a good story."

Carth paused to let this sink in. It was certainly a turn of events he had not expected, and his automatic reflex was to distrust her. She seemed to sense this, though.

"You know, I worked darn hard to get your trust throughout this game. I had no idea the development team programmed you with such a robust distrust algorithm." She crossed her arms. "I'm not quite what you expected, and now you think I'm going to, oh, I don't know… make pink elephants storm the Ebon Hawk. I'm not going to, you know. I'm just going to tweak the story so it's more realistic. And I thought I'd at least tell you, first."

A voice whispered in the back of his head. _Trust is always an act of faith, Carth._ He looked at her, and could see in her expression, in her eyes, that she really meant him no harm, and that turning the cockpit purple was the worst she was likely to do.

"All right… do what you like. Just don't turn the ship purple again."

Karalina grinned. "I can definitely comply. Don't worry, I'll just take a moment." She faded from the cockpit, and he could only assume that she, the end user, was tweaking something or other.

After about a half hour of waiting, he was getting nervous. They did, after all, need her to complete the mission, and the Sith fleet wasn't getting any smaller. He looked around, and said to the thin air, "Are you about done in there?"

Just then, everything went black.

"Oops."

Carth heard Karalina's voice in the darkness. "_What was that?"_

"Um, well…" she sounded a bit sheepish. "It looks like I segfaulted."

"And what's that supposed to mean?"

"It means I crashed the code."

"And how long will it take to fix this?"

"Well, it depends."

"On what?"

"On how big my mistake was, and how long it takes to figure out what that mistake is."

"Are we going to be here for a while?"

"Yep."

"But no purple?"

"Nope. And no pink elephants, either."

"Well," Carth sighed. "At least there aren't more gizka."


	2. Borrowing T3

Carth sat alone in his pilot's chair, trying to absorb the events of the last couple of hours. They had just escaped the _Leviathan_, and his mind was still reeling from the sudden turn of events. Bastila was still on that ship, in the clutches of Darth Malak, and Karalina wasn't really Karalina, she was Darth Revan. Carth had had a good many surprises in his lifetime, but this one outdid them all. All he needed was time alone to straighten his thoughts out, that was all...

A cheerful voice came in from behind him. "Hey, can I borrow T3 for a few hours?"

Carth whirled around. It was Karalina- Revan- whoever she was, but it wasn't exactly, either. It was as though that crazy person, the "end user," she'd called herself, took over and ended up turning the Ebon Hawk purple and crashing the game had returned.

"Yes, it's me again," she said cheerfully. "Now, I thought I'd ask you if I could borrow T3 for a few hours? I want to see if he can make any more sense out of this microcode than I can."

Carth sighed. "You know, you come in at the worst possible moments."

"Worst moment or no, I have some assembly code to write, and I'm sick of it. I want T3 to help me out. He's a machine, he ought to understand the machine language better than I can."

"Did you think that maybe I didn't want to see you right now? I mean, nothing personal, but you're a sore subject at the moment."

"And by me, I presume you mean my PC. This is understandable. I'd feel roughly the same in your shoes. What I think you need is some reassurance that everything really is going to turn out okay in the long run."

"Reassurance? Long run? What are you talking about?"

"I mean I know some people, from a few thousand years down the line, and they'll tell you it all works out in the end."

Carth snorted. "I'd love to see that."

Karalina grinned mischievously. "I can arrange it."

Seconds later, a new figure materialized before them. He wore brown pants and a tan shirt with some sort of shoulder guard. He had chestnut hair and a goatee, and wore the whole ensemble with a rogueish air. He also carried a lightsaber.

"Who is that, and why is he on my ship?" Carth demanded.

"My name's Kyle Katarn, pal, and you can cut the attitude." He crossed his arms. "No respect these days, I tell ya..."

"This," Karalina said, considerably more cordially, "is the Jedi Kyle Katarn. He's in the Jedi Knight series, about 4,000 some years after you. I borrowed him from the JK3 directory."

"Oh, is that why I'm on an antique ship? And here I thought it was the Force playing tricks on me."

"No, just me. And you'd recognise me more as Jaden, but this will have to suffice for now."

"So hold on just a second. This guy is supposed to reassure me? And how's that?" Carth looked slightly unimpressed.

"Well, he can tell you how things are in his time."

"And?"

Kyle shrugged. "Well, for a galaxy that's been at war on and off for most of my life, it's not doing so bad. Since the Empire fell, it's just a lot of rebuilding, and the New Republic does a mostly good job of it."

"Wait a minute, Empire? What's this Empire? And why is it a New Republic? What happens to the Republic?" Carth raised an eyebrow.

"Oh, well..." Karalina looked sheepish. "I forgot to mention that part. It's kinda complicated, involving the Sith infiltrating the Republic and turning it into an Empire, but hey, it's not for another 4 millennia. This war is long forgotten by the time the Sith really take over. Besides, the Empire's reign is relatively short, as approximately 25 to 30 years after its creation the Alliance to Restore the Republic took back the capital. And the Jedi come back, witness Kyle over here."

"Yeah, we're a hard lot to kill. Master Skywalker does a pretty good job with us."

"So you're telling me not to worry because death and destruction isn't really all that impending?"

"Well, it may be. But the Republic will ultimately ride the whole mess out." She shrugged. "What do you want? Life's not perfect."

Kyle cleared his throat. "Not that I'm not having a wonderful time on this delightful, er... ship, but I do have my own game to get back to."

"Certainly." Karalina faded away for a moment, and Kyle disappeared shortly after. She faded back in and smiled. "See? Everything turns out okay."

"Right... that doesn't make me feel better right now."

"Well, I had to try. Maybe someday you'll feel at least a little reassured by it."

Carth looked at her skeptically, but any annoyance that may have been residing in him quickly melted away at the sight of her grin. It was so innocent and charming, he couldn't find it in himself to hold anything against her.

"You know, you're a really strange person."

"But of course. Normal people, even in my world, don't hack into their computer games and talk to the characters." She shrugged. "I've never been one to be normal, though."

"Well, you shouldn't try to be normal. That would be, well... _boring_." He scratched his head. "And I kinda like it when you drop by, too. It keeps my mind of things, you know?"

"Don't think of it as dropping by, I'm always here. It's just a little more direct this way."

"Right. But you can... feel free to be direct more often, how's that?"

Karalina smiled. "I think I can comply with that request."

"Great," Carth couldn't help grinning back.

"Now, back to my original question- can I borrow T3?"


	3. In Search of the Final Paper

_What a mess_, Carth thought as he took a look at the hyperdrive. The _Ebon Hawk_ had just crash-landed on some Force-forsaken world, with the Star Forge lurking nearby and Bastila still in captivity. _Just what we needed._

Shaking his head, he stepped out of the engine room and turned the corner, only to be hit by a human missile in the form of Karalina Jade. "What-"

"It's gone!" She said in a panic.

"What's gone?"

"My ten page paper! The computer ate it!" She waved her hands frantically to emphasize her point.

"Your- oh. It's you again." The infamous "end user." He briefly wondered if she was ever going to get around to telling him her name.

"Charming, Mr. Onasi. Just charming." She crossed her arms in front of her. "And I don't suppose you've ever had a computer eat your final paper."

"I haven't written a paper in years."

"There's your problem! You've no sympathy for the plight of the student any longer."

Carth sighed. "And what do you want me to do about it?"

"Help me look for it, of course. You're looking for stuff on this world anyway, so can't you come with me and help me look for my paper while you're at it?" She looked at him pleadingly. "It's my final paper, and I worked on it for weeks. Please?"

Dammit, he never could resist that look. "Oh... fine. Just so long as the mission stays on track."

"But of course. I wouldn't have it any other way. I just want to find my paper, and then I'll leave you alone."

"Well, if we're going to find it, we should head out." He checked the charges on his blasters, saw that they were still in good fighting order.

"All right, let's go."

Most of the day had passed by, and they had found the parts to fix the hyperdrive, as well as visited both of the Rakata camps, but the paper was nowhere to be found.

Karalina buried her head in her hands. "I'm doomed. I'm going to _fail_, and they're going to put me on academic probation."

"No you're not... I'm sure it will turn up somewhere. Or if worse comes to worse, you could always rewrite it."

Her eyes widened as if to say, _are you insane?_ "Do you have any idea how much time that would take? I've already written it once, writing it again would be murderous."

He threw up his hands defensively. "Hey, I was just suggesting it. No need to burst into flame, there."

The look of utter despair on her face pulled at his heartstrings, but there was little he could do to remedy the situation. She plopped down on a nearby rock and reached over to pet a gizka who hopped by.

It looked delighted, and opened its mouth to coo-

-and that was not what came out.

"An engaging game makes the player care about her characters," croaked the gizka.

"What the-" Karalina almost fell off the rock in shock.

"I... didn't know gizka could talk."

"That's not just talking. That's my paper!"

"Gaut begins his article with explaining identification. Some say identification is being numerically identical to a character, which is impossible. Others argue that it is simply to say that one cares for a specific character..."

"Who's Gaut?" Carth asked.

"Some philosopher. And I can't believe you're asking about the text while a _gizka_ is doing the talking!"

"I was curious! Even though the talking gizka is a little weird."

"Really? I hadn't noticed."

"...I can also imagine the property of not running into myself, which is not that difficult to imagine in this context..."

Karalina looked at the gizka pointedly. "You're cute, but you ate my paper. Give it back?"

The gizka looked at her sweetly. "... when the audience knows no more and no less than a character, it encourages us to identify much more closely with that specific character. Witness again the scene in Empire Strikes Back. The audience is just as shocked as Luke is..."

"I don't think he's listening to you. And what's this 'Empire Strikes Back'?"

"It's a film. That I was using as an example to explain the article."

"So Luke is a person in this film?"

"Yeah, he's a Jedi, at least in training. Nice guy, a little whiny. Too much time on Tatooine, I think."

"Wait- so there's a film about this galaxy?"

"Well, yeah, but you're way before Luke's time. Remember Kyle?"

"Oh... right. Much later."

"You got it."

Karalina looked forlornly at the gizka. "I don't suppose I could just take you to my professor, could I?"

"...This is also not very useful, just a nifty feature. Consequently, I would suggest that the point-of-view shot is far from being the heart of identification..."

"That's what I thought." She sighed. "Well, maybe I can hack the code later. For now, I need a break."

"Why don't we go back to the ship, get some food?"

Karalina closed her eyes and half-smiled. "Okay, food is good. Food helps me keep going. Exams are almost over, everything will be okay."

"Oh, come here." Carth reached over and gave her a hug. "Don't worry, I'm sure you'll be able to get your paper from the... gizka."

He released her, and she took a deep breath. After considering this for a moment, she said, "So that's how I had to get a hug out of you? Get my paper eaten by a gizka? That's a little counterintuitive. But thanks, I needed that."

"No problem. Now let's go get that food."

They walked away, and the gizka hopped behind them, delighting the pair with the deficiencies of the philsophers' veiws on identification in light of the development of role playing games. It tried to follow them aboard, but Mission quickly shooed it out.

And thus the poor gizka sat outside the Ebon Hawk, mournfully reciting the bibliography.


	4. Star Maps, Texture Maps, and a Chicken

Trips between planets were usually uneventful, resulting often in the general boredom of the crew. This sometimes resulted in strange behaviour, but this was a new one.

Carth watched as Karalina Jade stared intently at Zaalbar. She'd been doing it for quite some time, and he couldn't quite figure out why. For the first while, he hadn't bothered to ask about it, but it was starting to get a bit creepy.

Approaching her, he tapped her on the shoulder. "Um, Karalina, are you all right?"

She blinked and looked up. "Oh, you. I'm fine, I'm just trying to figure out how they texture mapped his fur."

"How what?"

"Texture mapping! I'm trying to texture map my modeling project, and it's not being friendly."

"I... don't think I understand."

She stared blankly at him for a moment, then something seemed to snap. "Oh! That's right. This is a different savegame."

It was Carth's turn to stare at her blankly. "Different savegame?"

"Yes. I explained this to you in a different game, when I was Leiraya Moran. I'm the end user, I just like to drop in every once in a while."

Huh. The name seemed familiar, and he felt like he should know what she was talking about. "Okay... so what's this about texture mapping?"

Karaline sighed patiently. "You, my friend, are a Maya binary file. As am I, actually. Come to think of it, when I get the hang of it, I don't think I'm going to bother taking over the PC anymore. I'll just model myself and saunter in, or something. Assuming the program doesn't eat me."

"Eat you?"

"Yep. Maya's already eaten two of my projects- Darth NURBS and a chicken." She rested her chin in her hand, sighing ruefully. "Darth NURBS looked darn hot, too."

Carth scratched his head. "What's a chicken?"

"Oh- never mind." Karalina shook her head and resumed her staring. "I'm working on modeling the Evil Lightsaber-Wielding Sith Lord Ewok of d00m, and he needs to be furry."

"I didn't know Ewoks could be Sith Lords."

She looked back at him with an annoyed expression on her face. "You know, you sound exactly like all the guys in the labs. 'Oh, but Ewoks are chaotic good and can't be Sith!' I get enough of that in real life, thanks. Just work with me, all right?"

Silence hung between them for a few moments before Carth spoke. "Can we go back to the part where you're not Karalina?"

"Oh, for pity's sake." She stood up and poked his bright orange jacket firmly. "I'm the gamer on the other end of this machine, I just like messing with code. It means I can do fun stuff like this."

The area around them flickered briefly, and suddenly they were standing in the middle of the Dantooine Jedi Enclave's courtyard. "Hey, how did we get here?"

"Warp codes. Aren't they fun?"

"I think I'm confused." He looked around, trying to make sense out of his surroundings. It was almost exactly how he had left it weeks before, with the exception of a new statue that seemed to have appeared in a corner of the courtyard. "Hey, when did that get here?"

"What?" She turned around, and her jaw dropped. "You've got to be kidding me."

"Kidding about what? It's just a really strange looking statue." He looked at it more closely. "With no arms."

"And only one leg." Karalina smacked herself in the forehead. "I can't believe this."

"How can you tell there's only one leg? You can't even really see her legs under that skirt."

"Because _that_ was supposed to be Darth NURBS!"

Carth peered at it once more. "She doesn't look like a Sith. Where's her lightsaber?"

"I didn't get the chance to model it before the program ate it. What good was a lightsaber before I got a chance to add arms?"

"You have a point."

The two of them simply stared at the statue for a while, watching as people would walk by and admire the new installation. They heard snippets of comments, ranging from, "What a lovely new addition to the Enclave, I hear it was brought straight from Coruscant," to "What an eyesore! Some people have no taste in decoration, and I think the Jedi are among them."

"Well," Karalina said absently, "That locates one project gone awry."

"What's next on your list, the chicken?"

She nodded. "Yep, the chicken."

"Any ideas where it could be?"

"None whatsoever."

"Well, at least you know it's around somewhere."

She sighed. "Yeah, somewhere. This is a big game, you know."

"I guess so. But we'll keep our eyes peeled."

"Oh, there won't be any missing it. It will be big and yellow."

And so they left the statue of Darth NURBS standing at the Enclave, returning to the Ebon Hawk to continue the search for the Star Maps and the missing chicken.


	5. DOWNLOAD VIRUBGONE TODAY!

**Chapter Five: DOWNLOAD VIRU-B-GONE TODAY AND RECEIVE A FREE IPOD!**

Wandering about the ship, Carth tried to amuse himself. Karalina was out in Anchorhead with Bastila and Mission, so he was fairly certain that, at least for a while, he was safe from this "End User" character. He decided to take the opportunity to browse the HoloNet, and settled down happily in front of the computer terminal.

Unfortunately, the terminal was in no mood to be messed with. The screen merely blinked at him, reading, "YOUR COMPUTER MAY BE INFECTED BY VIRUSES. SCAN WITH VIRU-B-GONE FREE TODAY."

"What the-?" He tried tapping a few more buttons, but all it did was spread the ads to other computer windows in the area. Soon, he was surrounded by obnoxious animated images ranging from warnings about spyware to congratulations for winning a free iPod, whatever _that_ was. "Oh, hell."

"Don't tell me it got in here, too!"

Carth whirled around to find himself face to face with a character a bit shorter than he, wearing an orange dress over black pants, and with a lively orange mohawk. She also looked a bit cartoonish, which was more than odd. However, he knew it could only be one person.

"So, you're back. Would you care to explain what happened here?"

"Argh. I let a friend use my computer for a while, and I don't know what she did to it, but there's spyware _everywhere._" She buried her face in her hands. "I didn't even know spyware could get in to games. Maybe that's where it hides so the IT people can't find it."

"Well, can you get rid of it?"

She paused. "I… I think so?" She shrugged. "I'm not really used to dealing with this… I mostly use the other operating system, and people don't _write_ spyware for Linux. It's going to be an adventure, certainly."

Great. He was surrounded by adverts for the Force only knew what, and his only hope was a cartoon character with a mohawk who wasn't sure she knew how to get rid of it.

In the meantime, she was intently examining the computer terminals. "I have to figure out a way to get the scanners to deep-scan the game."

"Have you ever done that before?"

"What do you think?" She scratched her head and grimaced. "Where's T3?"

The little astromech, hearing his name mentioned, whistled and rolled into the room. "Dee deet?"

"All right, little guy… can I download some programs on to you?"

T3 whistled an affirmative, and she pulled what appeared to be some sort of memory stick out of her pocket. "There are three programs here- I want you to run each one of them, and delete anything and everything it finds. I don't care if it asks you to restart the game." After another cheerful whistle, she inserted the stick into his memory slot and stepped back. "Okay, do your stuff."

Carth looked skeptically at the 'droid. "Can you do that?"

She shrugged. "If people only did stuff they _could_ do, we'd never have any advancement in the world, now, would we?"

"Point." He paused to look at T3, plugged into the _Ebon Hawk_'s main computer and scanning for malicious software. "So… now that you're not hijacking Karalina anymore, do I get to hear your real name? Or am I going to have to keep calling you End User?"

"Well, my character's name is Riley. She's the model I used for my final project, doing a little tap dance. You can call me Alex, though."

"Alex? Are you a he on the other end?"

"No, the full name's Shawn Alexandra." She half-grinned. "Couldn't go by my first name, since it was the same as one of my aunts. So Alex it was."

"Huh." He'd heard of cultures where children were given two names, but hadn't really run into anyone with more than one. "I guess that makes sense."

"You're not the first person who's needed an explanation. Although, usually the question I get is, 'How do you get Alex out of Shawn?' Simple enough- I don't." She looked back over to the astromech 'droid, happily sorting through the filesystems. "How's it going over there?"

"Dreee deet!" T3 trilled, then blatted as he printed the number of infected files found on the screen.

Carth's eyes nearly bugged out when he saw it. "Damn it, what did your friend do to this computer? 176 files?"

"And that's only one program."

"So…" Carth examined the character in front of him. "Do you like this model?"

She shrugged. "Meh, it's okay. Not bad for a first attempt, certainly, and it moves pretty nicely. But I think I'm going to find a way to do better hair at some point. The mohawk isn't really me. However," she added, almost as an afterthought, "It's much more fun coming in here in my own model rather than taking over the PC. And adding stuff to the game is kinda fun. Now I see why the modding community is so huge."

"Modding community?" Carth looked confused. "What's that?"

"It's people who have played the game so many times that they feel the need to add things to keep it interesting. Or they want extra items. Or whatever. Did you ever wonder why there's a random store in the _Ebon Hawk's_ basement?"

Well, it had been a little strange the first time he found it. "Modding people?"

"Oh yeah. Also, Karalina's purple robes are courtesy of the modders. I happen to like the colour purple."

"Didn't you turn the cockpit purple in a different game?"

She grinned at the memory of her handiwork. "That was enjoyable."

T3 beeped, indicating that he was done. 348 infected files scrolled across the screen, and Alex shook her head. "Good grief. Get rid of 'em, T3."

With a quick turn of his computer appendage, the files were deleted, and T3 trilled to inform them that the game would need to be restarted in order to make sure that the files didn't come back.

"All right, that's my cue to leave," Alex said. "I'll shut you guys down for just a moment until this is fixed." With that, she left the room, and moments later, everything went dark.

When the game restarted moments later, Carth blinked and looked around. Alex was nowhere to be seen, but that wasn't especially surprising. What _was_ surprising was the large pink recliner in the corner that seemed to have the stuffing poking out of the top.

"How did _this_ get in here?"

Almost in response, the chair started moving towards him. He stumbled backwards in surprise, bumping straight into the computer. He narrowed his eyes at the offending chair and bellowed, "ALEX!"

Annoyed though he was, he could swear he heard her laughter as the chair turned around and skittered out of the room.


End file.
